Grandparents’ marital distress and psychological well-being: Moderating effect of coping strategy

Abstract

The provision of primary care for grandchildren is known to have a crucial impact on custodial grandparents' psychological well-being. For married custodial grandparents, marital distress resulting from the caregiving burden may lead to psychological stress. The effect of marital distress due to caregiving stress on psychological stress, however, has not been examined with this population. To address this gap, the current study examined how custodial grandparents' marital distress associated with the caregiving burden can affect their psychological stress mutually in a couple based on the actor and partner interdependence model framework. This study also tested how coping strategies can moderate the link between marital distress and psychological stress from the stress and coping perspective. Participants were grandparents couples providing full-time care to their grandchild in the absence of the grandchildren's biological parents for at least three months (N = 193; Mage = 58.14 GF; 56.09 GM). The results reveal that one’s higher marital distress was associated with one’s greater depressive symptoms for both grandmothers and grandfathers. With anxiety, I found notable gender discrepancies. Grandmothers’ higher marital distress was related to their higher anxiety and grandfathers’ higher anxiety. However, grandfathers’ marital distress was not related to their own and grandmothers’ anxiety. In addition, with the moderated effect of problem-focused coping, a higher level of marital distress of grandmothers was related to higher levels of anxiety for both grandfathers and grandmothers. Emotional coping aggravated the relationships between both grandfathers’ and grandmothers’ marital distress and their own depressive symptoms. Emotional coping also aggravated the negative effect of grandmothers’ marital distress on both grandfathers’ and grandmothers’ anxiety. These findings highlight the salience of caregiving stress on marital relationships and the psychological outcomes for custodial grandparents. These findings also provide the value of the dyadic approach in examining the implication of both custodial grandparents' marital distress on their psychological well-being. Future studies need to validate gender differences.